Jürg FREY
“120 Pieces of Sound”

Jürg Frey’s unique compositional approach places him at the cutting edge of contemporary classical music while simultaneously maintaining a touch of impressionistic/romantic aesthetics in its roots.

The album ‘120 Pieces of Sound’ contains two of Frey’s significant compositions: ’60 Pieces of Sound’ (2009) and ‘L’âme est sans retenue II’ (1997-2000). Frey and the Boston-based ensemble Ordinary Affects (Laura Cetilia, Morgan Evans-Weiler, J.P.A. Falzone, Luke Martin) performed and recorded ’60 Pieces of Sound’ in New England in 2017, in which Frey’s clarinet and Cetilia’s cello played the pitches in the two-part melody written in the score, while the rest played the open instrumentation part with undetermined sounds. The resulting music was a unique series of harmonies created by open instrumental sounds with a faintly recognizable melody hidden in the core of the ensemble’s evenly tempered sounds. The impressions of the chords move along at the edge of consonance and dissonance with the afterglows of each chord in the subsequent silence, hovering somewhere between meditative calmness and disquieting shadow, while bringing an organic warmth and a feeling of breathable open air into a minimal musical structure.

‘L’âme est sans retenue II’ was written for field recordings and bass clarinet. Frey first edited the field recording parts from the materials he recorded in Berlin in 1997, and later added his bass clarinet sound with a certain pitch as an underlying tone that would blend with the field recordings. Frey’s bass clarinet is discreet and almost unrecognizable, often hidden under the complex layers of the field recordings, and yet clarifying the harmonization of the field recordings from inside. Presenting these two pieces ’60 Pieces of Sound’ and ‘L’âme est sans retenue II’ back to back on this album brings out the fundamental aesthetic of Frey’s compositions in regards to how he approaches the ‘harmonization’ and ‘openness’ of the music.